


It's Gonna be the Hard Way

by Ijustwannaread



Category: Iron Man (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst, Arc Reactor Angst, Arc Reactor Issues, Character Study, F/M, Fix-It of Sorts, Gen, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Mental Health Issues, Post-Iron Man 3, Pre-Civil War (Marvel), Steve Rogers & Tony Stark Friendship, i'm not much better but at least I try, marvel writers are shit at writing mental health
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-03
Updated: 2018-05-03
Packaged: 2019-05-01 20:58:07
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,816
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14529036
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ijustwannaread/pseuds/Ijustwannaread
Summary: Tony Stark is going to learn that dealing with anxiety requires actually dealing with it. He's going to learn this lesson in one of two ways: the easy way, or the hard way.





	It's Gonna be the Hard Way

**Author's Note:**

> This is for anyone who was annoyed Iron Man 3 tried to wrap up Tony Stark's anxiety with a neat little bow at the end of the movie. Marvel thanks for sort of talking about his anxiety issues but not really. Everyone in the MCU needs therapy.

Tony Stark is like a lab rat. He is remarkably resilient, probably to a fault. He should have died from electrocution at age twelve given the dumb stunts he tried with car engines, he should have died at sixteen from alcohol poisoning given the sheer amount of shitty vodka he drank, and he definitely should have died by strangulation given the obnoxious pick up lines he used to throw at women just to prove how sleazy he could be. Surviving all that, the shrapnel in the heart ought to have offed him easily. 

  
The point is, Tony Stark did not exactly treat his body like a temple before he was blown up. He slept four hours a night, he ran on black coffee, fast food and expensive whisky.  Like a lab rat, his life operated akin to a series of increasingly reckless experiments on his own mortality. Working hypothesis: he could survive anything. Any scientist will tell you that hypotheses can never be proven right: they can only be supported, but Tony had gathered thirty plus years of evidence in support of this theory. Just like humans evolved from monkeys and gravity makes things fall, Tony Stark is a survivor. 

  
Although waking up plugged into a car battery where his sternum should have been didn't prove his immortality hypothesis wrong, it effectively removed the appeal of gathering any more evidence. 

  
Coming home from Afghanistan and building an armor suit for himself was definitely a shitty metaphor for facing his own mortality by not facing it. While throwing himself into measurements, calculations, and schematics  might not have been the professionally recommended way to deal with the aftermath of a traumatic event, it seemed to be working.   
Besides, it's pretty hard to ignore a life changing event when it's embedded in your chest and lit up like a fucking glow stick. So, yeah, life won't go back to normal. Now, when he goes to sleep, the room will always have an ambient blue brightness. He always sleeps on his back, because any other position makes his chest ache until he needs to get up and take a lap around the room, breathing through it. Luckily, Tony Stark is a freak of nature, so his body adapts to the chunk missing from his chest, and the new tech embedded there. JARVIS lets him know that his resting core temperature has raised 1.5 degrees, which strikes Tony as a cross between mildly interesting and deeply disturbing. 

  
Sometimes he finds himself tapping on the metal absentmindedly, like a middle schooler might run their tongue across a new set of braces. Other times, he wakes up from a dream in which he pulls the entire arc reactor straight out of his chest as easily as he would slip a pair of sunglasses off of his face. Then he wakes up and his skin crawls for hours it felt so real and it’s impossible. 

  
Tony starts living like a health nut. He'll still cram a cheeseburger down his throat here and there, but in between that, he mainly drinks spinach-filled smoothies and anything with plenty of zinc and iron in it. He goes to the gym every day like clockwork, sometimes to spar with Happy and sometimes to run mindlessly until he can't breathe. He started this when he realized that the arc reactor in his chest just kept throwing his body curveballs like an inconsiderate new roommate. 

  
What most people don't know is that the poisoning episode is not the only time that the arc reactor fucks with him. Before his captivity, Tony’s lifestyle had been like a bingo board for activities that weaken an immune system (stress! heavy drinking! Crappy diet! Undiagnosed depression!) but he got away with years of utterly perfect physical health.  After the arc reactor, his health streak bought the farm in a big way. 

When he woke up one morning after eight solid hours of sleep with his throat burning and his sinuses clogged, the first cold he'd had since he was eight years old, he chalked it up to bad luck. Pepper dutifully didn’t mention his gravelly voice and he drank extra water and slept an extra hour per night for a few days and it was all fine until noon five days later when he feels like all of the heat has just evaporated from his body, and he can't stop shaking with sudden chills.

  
He was, unfortunately in his office at SI. He turned the heat up a couple of degrees and held on until his muscles felt strung out from the shivering and he realized that most of his attention was now focused on not allowing his teeth to chatter. Lucky for him, his history of erratic behavior renders an early exit from work perfectly normal, so he ducked out as gracefully as he can, opting to drive himself home to avoid Happy despite feeling more and more like ten miles of bad road. 

What he should do is call a doctor. What he does do is pop four Advil, down a half gallon of water, and pass out dead until next afternoon. And because he is practically a medical miracle in terms of physical tenacity, he woke up functional, if groggy and sore. 

Health blips like that become a norm: unpredictable and definitely somehow related to his new hardware. Which is why when it takes him a while to suspect anything is up when the arc reactor ups the ante and throws heavy metal poisoning into the mix. 

At the onset, he had a low grade headache for three weeks on end, which made him extra strung out and acerbic. Pepper noticed the mood change, but not the pain, because Tony is good like that. He effectively ignored it, waiting for the storm to pass like he does with all of his various oscillating health quirks. He ate clean, exercised, tried to sleep.   
He was forced to face reality at last when he was sitting in the workshop, finished with a project, and realized that he had been sitting for ten minutes staring his screen saver, trying to muster the strength to stand up and go to bed. He dragged himself as far as the bottom of the stairwell, and found that his legs were rubber, and he was breathing in thready gulps after walking twenty feet. He standed there for the two minutes that it takes for his heart rate to settle, then abandoned the task altogether and slogged back into the cool leather backseat of the closest car in the shop. He didn’t remember falling asleep.

The next morning he ordered a home blood test kit and JARVIS informed him that the reactor was killing him. 

  
The rest is ancient history, another data point on the ever expanding list of things that change when you have a large metal cylinder intruding where your internal organs used to be. The New Tony is germaphobic and a health nut by necessity. And he feels entitled to this level of eccentricity, because he’s getting older and tired of waiting for the other shoe to drop. Tired of knowing that the arc reactor will just keep dealing out new hurdles, and he will keep fighting them off. His body hasn’t failed him yet, but it’s starting to feel like a losing battle.            

* * *

 

Tony never considers removing the arc reactor for a lot of reasons. Some of it is definitely to do with the fact that when he came home his psyche was held together by an obsession with performing acts of vigilante heroism. Then came the distraction of the imminent threat of extraterrestrial mass destruction. Then his own personal vendetta against a terrorist. Etcetera, etcetera. 

When faced with problem of Pepper and Extremis, it feels like his brain slows down to a reasonable speed again. There is a problem that needs fixing, a new puzzle that has a concrete solution, not an abstract like “protecting the world from an unknown alien threat.” He can’t do it alone, so he and Pepper pool their considerable talents to find a solution. Pepper’s blazing business acumen means that she can wrangle the world’s foremost medical minds and bend them to her will with ease, and Tony knows a thing or two about body modification technology himself.  They become the next experts on the technology and meet anyone worth their salt in the medical community in the process. By the time the threat of Extremis is effectively neutralized, Tony finds himself and Pepper at a Michelin-star restaurant in Hong Kong, celebrating and thanking Dr. Lian Chiang, one of their frequent contacts throughout their search. The meal lasts hours and is spent chatting comfortably, until Lian becomes visibly tense and clearly is about to ask something awkward. 

You don’t make it to the top of any field without a solid set of balls, though, so she visibly shakes off her doubts, looks Tony in the eye and comes out with it. 

“I know you must be tired of listening to people ask this, but if you ever want a consult on your problem,” she says pointing at Tony’s chest, “if you would consider my help, I would be grateful for the opportunity.” 

Pepper shoots him a look with a cross between surprise and alarm. 

“You mean to take out the shrapnel?” Tony says, tone clearly indicating disbelief, while simultaneously realizing that compared to turning his girlfriend from a fiery hell monster back to normal, open heart surgery and bone reconstruction is certainly within the realm of current medical achievement. The idea hits him like a ton of bricks.  Lian looks at him like she suspects he might be a bit slow, but waits patiently for a response. 

“Can you do it?” He asks.

“Well, any surgeon worth their degree thinks know how. There are probably a handful that actually can, and I’m one of them.” She says.

“You mean to say the entire international medical community has been fighting over me behind my back?” He deflects. 

“Well, yes.” 

“And whoever gets their hands on me basically wins the case study jackpot?” 

“Yes.” 

“How about that?” Tony says to Pepper, whose face has morphed into a mask of polite, cautious interest behind which he knows are about a million questions and fears.  

 

Tony lies awake that night in their hotel suite. It has struck him that the only real thing between him and freedom from the arc reactor is his own fear. And everyone know that Stark men don’t feel fear. 

Of course, there are risks attached with any experiment. Lian, who is nothing if not honest, has told him the percentages with professional detachment. Pepper hears them as well,  and he can see it in her eyes that part of her wishes Tony had never had his eyes opened to this possibility. But she’s also too shrewd to ignore how hard living with the arc reactor can be sometimes. Tony might have hidden it when he was being poisoned, but she was there when he was detoxing from the palladium after the fight. He dropped ten pounds in a week and could barely move. She’s seen him wake up from a dead sleep gripping the arc reactor like it’s a python trying to strangle him. 

So Tony does what he hasn’t done since before Afghanistan, and he makes a purely selfish decision. He calls Lian and she says she’ll pencil him in. 

 

* * *

 

Fury tells the team that Ironman will be off the roster for a month during a debriefing about their most involved mission since they had first become a group. He lobs that revelation at them in the last five minutes as an afterthought. It strikes Steve as sort of a blow that the aloof SHIELD leader can blankly relate that kind of ominous news about their friend as though none of them have any personal stake in the matter.  

He searches his mind for anything strange or sinister in his recent interactions with Tony. He’s fairly sure that the last person to have seen him was Bruce, who had flown to China to meet them for a consult on the Extremis issue not two weeks ago. They had all expected him to return with Bruce for this meeting, and then to properly celebrate the Extremis success, because Tony never turned up a chance to throw a party.  His absence from the debrief is felt, but it doesn’t necessarily raise any alarms. Tony Stark is often everywhere and nowhere. 

Steve knows that Fury expects him to recalculate his strategy in dealing with the latest threat on the horizon short a teammate, but what he wants to do is call Pepper and ask her what gives. Or Rhodes, but he isn’t sure the knows Rhodes like that yet. Really, Steve isn’t even sure how to define his relationship with Tony, but the hold of his curiosity indicates that it might be due for a reevaluation. 

He adheres to his principles of preserving his friend’s privacy, so he leaves it alone until Natasha asks him out for drinks two days later. They meet at a dimly lit bar somewhere deep upstate. Natasha drinks a lethal looking martini and Steve has a coke because it’s cheaper than booze that won’t lighten his mood in the slightest. 

Natasha tells him about her plans to go undercover again to gather some intel for their mission, and then they easily lapse into more personal conversation, which is a new habit which still unnerves Steve, if he’s being honest. 

“So I guess Pepper isn’t going to be the next new super human Avenger, officially. You’re back to being one of a kind, Rogers,” Natasha teases. 

“Disappointed that the Avengers won’t have another leading lady?” Steve asks, wondering what it would be like if Pepper joined the team and finding that his imagination comes up just short. Natasha smiles a bit at that, and Steve wonders if she’s thinking the same thing he is: if Pepper Potts decided to fight crime, she would be a force to be reckoned with.

“Not quite,” she says, but she’s smiling wistfully. Steve knows that Natasha respects Pepper, might even be on friendly terms with her, but that’s the kind of that she information she keeps on a need to know basis. 

“I know what’s going on with Stark, you know,” she says, and gives him a probing look. 

“Fury told you?” Steve asks, surprised. 

“No.”

“Pepper, then?”

“Nope,” Natasha says, giving him a look that says, ‘hey, what can you do?’ as if regularly engaging in after-hours spy business is just another hazard of the job. 

“Guess he really doesn’t want anyone to know,” Steve says, part of him still committed absolutely to preserving Tony’s privacy, and a strong part of him newly unable to combat a pool of worry that is forming in the pit of his stomach. It’s weird, he hadn’t felt this nervous for Tony even when he’d seen the news reports of the missile attack on his Malibu house. It hadn’t truly occured to any of the Avengers to consider that Tony would even vaguely have been dead then, despite the intense public speculation. 

Natasha isn’t playing with him, she thinks he should know for some reason, but she’s leaving the ball in his court. 

“He’s an idiot if he thinks that he can keep it quiet for long, though,” Natasha says, taking a final pull on her drink.  “Call him, see if he talks.”

“Why should I?” Steve asks. 

“Stark is never going to trust me, and he shouldn't. But he might trust you. Isn’t that what you want?” Natasha says. 

Steve is momentarily at a loss. Tentatively, he gives her a grateful smile, and marvels at the oddity of having an international assassin as one of his closest friends. 

Steve and Natasha leave the bar at last call, exchanging brief smiles as a parting gesture. 

Steve had been planning on sticking around the compound for a while, but instead he turns on his motorcycle and points it in a direction and drives, letting the growl of the engine and the dark, gentle slopes of the New York landscape swallow him up like a blanket. Since Bucky had resurfaced, Steve has been living more of a vagabond lifestyle than before, but he’s found that constantly moving keeps him relaxed, in a way.  He has completely lost track of where he is when he cuts the engine and pulls out his phone. As it stops ringing, he realizes he wasn’t expecting an answer. 

“Cap?” 

“Tony, I-” Steve hesitates, and regrets it immediately. 

“If this is about the mission, Fury sent me the briefings, and I know you’re gonna need some more firepower for this one- no offense- so I got it all set up. Rhodey is down to suit up, not as War Machine, though, the military still has him by the short and curlies, but he’s good to take on Ironman. Obviously, it’ll pale in comparison to yours truly, but it’ll hold you over-”  

“Wait, Tony, hold up,” Steve cuts in. He takes a deep breath and blurts out the question he’s been dying to ask. 

“Is everything okay?” He’s very glad for the invention of cell phones, because he doesn’t have to witness Tony’s reaction to that question. Anything approaching feelings territory is such a no-go that dealing with it remotely is the only way this conversation could even take place. There’s only a couple seconds of silence on the other end, but Tony not talking is so rare that Steve checks his screen to see if he’s been hung up on. 

“All good. Getting the arc reactor removed next week. Rhodey’s coming out to see me off, but he’s all yours after that,” Tony said casually, deflecting.  “Should be back in Manhattan early next month, you should come out and I’ll hook you up with some new tech I’ve been working on. Bring your friend, Sam was it? He’s desperately in need of an upgrade, I can’t believe you let him go out and do superhero work with that antique gear, it’s criminal.” 

Tony carries on, but Steve has stopped listening. Tries to connect the dots here. He understands on a basic level how the arc reactor powers the Ironman suit, and also that it is implanted in Tony’s chest to keep him alive, like a pacemaker. Tony always seems to flaunt it proudly through his t-shirts, and it is such a fixture in his presence that it seems inconceivable that he would have it removed, especially with a timing that coincides bafflingly with the most important Avengers mission they had received since the group formed. Steve feels a flicker of something like anger, because Stark can always be trusted follow his own agenda, everyone else’s needs be damned. However, there is an edge to Tony’s voice that Steve has grown attuned to hearing over the years; he’s afraid. 

So Steve swallows his onslaught of conflicting emotions. 

“Okay. Next month, Stark. Holding you to it,” Steve says curtly, ignoring the fact that Tony isn’t even remotely finished talking.

“Yep.” 

“Tony, good luck.” He throws in. 

“Yep.” Tony does hang up then.  

 

* * *

 

The doctors say that it will take at least two months for the initial healing process to be complete. The first week home from the hospital passes in a drugged haze. It feels like he’s finally sleeping after what might have been years. Tony starts to think that this might have been a good decision. He dutifully walks, keeps the incisions clean, doesn’t lift anything heavy, the whole nine yards. When he pulls the gauze off of his chest for the first time, he lets out a heavy breath that he didn’t know he was holding. 

Pepper is gentle with him, and he lets her be. Things feel good. 

Then something changes. The pain doesn’t precisely get worse, but it doesn’t let up. The drug haze doesn’t quite touch it. Tony still gets up, gets dressed, walks. 

Then Pepper brings the Arc Reactor tucked away in a clear plastic medical bag. He is sitting on the couch, reading through some data on his pad when she holds it up expectantly, asking him what he wants to do with it. Last time he had pretended he couldn’t care less. 

This time, the blood in his veins turns to ice, and he feels a hot chill run down his back. His free hand flies instinctively to his chest, because if the arc reactor is over there, that means that it isn’t in his chest, which means pain. It means his heart skipping and darkness closing in on the sides of his vision. It means Obadiah pulling it out of his chest, but that was years ago. 

Instead of feeling the unyielding metal where his heart should be, Tony feels a gauze pad which immediately sends flares of pain into his already overstimulated brain. 

It must have been the way that his face went ghost white that caused Pepper to to drop the arc reactor on the counter with a loud clunk. The sound barely registers over the ringing in his ears. 

“Tony?” She says. She is at his side in an instant, but the corners of his vision are getting cloudy, and he can’t seem to convince his body to pull in any oxygen. 

Pepper holds him until he can regain enough purchase to blink away the tears that formed at the corner of his eyes, and take a long, shaky breath. 

Tony wants to open his mouth and tell her that it’s okay, it was just a fluke. He wants to punt the arc reactor off the George Washington bridge and just laugh. But that isn’t how it is going to go, after all. 

That’s right around the same time he stops sleeping again. 

 

After the two months, Tony officially declares himself “recovered.” He doubles back on his official mental health regime: astounding technological output. He drinks coffee through an IV and plays fast and loose with the schedule the doctors gave him for weaning off of the narcotics. He’s just so goddamn frustrated with himself and this whole thing, but the only thing he can seem to do is make the same mistakes over and over. 

It all ends when Tony comes home at dawn in their living room to see Pepper sitting on the balcony, watching the sun crest the skyline. She is barefoot, and uncharacteristically missing her phone. Tony thinks she’s watching the sunrise until he sees the tear tracks on her face. 

 

Pepper leaves him. Tony is left staring at the last flash of amber disappearing from the bottom of his whisky glass when a thought occurs to him: this might be what rock bottom feels like. But he’s been here before. 

So he gets to work. 

 

**Author's Note:**

> PSA: I did my best to represent anxiety/depression, but I'm definitely not an expert on writing about this stuff. To be honest, I just feel like mental health issues can feel unrelenting, and most people don't have Marvel to come in and write off their issues with a stupid stinger scene where Bruce Banner falls asleep and it's all played for laughs. Also Pepper and him broke up which stresses me out so I wanted to write it as a loving sort of break up for my own sake. I choose to believe that anyone sane in Pepper's position would need to get the hell out of watching someone self-destruct so completely, because it just damn hard to watch people you love suffer. 
> 
> This is my first time writing in the MCU, and man, yikes. Not personally touching Infinity War with a ten foot pole, but kudos to all the brave souls out there who want to combat the shitty choice of spending thirty minutes of my time trying to get us to give a shit about Thanos' "feelings" dammit.... All I came here to do was write some Pepper/Tony angst, and set up some Steve/Tony angst for later. Because that's what I call a good time.


End file.
